The truth Hirst: how Damien Hirst got trolled so hard he had a 16 year old arrested
The more successful an artist gets, the thinner their skin tends to become. There are few more perfect examples of this than that of Damien Hirst.
Like clockwork, it seemingly happens to everyone, and if you look with your empathetic hat on, you can see where it comes from. When starting out as an artist, rejection and ridicule become part of everyday life, especially as a creative who operates out of the ordinary. You will put yourself out there, with your unusual style, and a whole lot of people will laugh in your face or, possibly even more hurtfully, shrug their shoulders and never think about it again for as long as they live.
If you can’t get through that, you probably won’t ever be an artist again. However, something seems to happen when an artist successfully breaks through into the mainstream, where they stop actually engaging with anyone who doesn’t believe in their work.
Hirst became the very picture of this phenomenon for both good and ill after his imperial phase in the mid-1990s. Only a true hater would say that Hirst wasn’t a genuinely interesting artistic voice in his prime, but the moment the millennium came and went, something seemed to snap. Suddenly, he had all the ego of an artist of his reputation… with none of the work to show for it.
Thus, when a 16-year-old boy started messing with his work, Hirst went on the warpath.
Who was this 16-year-old that pissed off Damian Hirst?
In 2008, the 16-year-old graffiti artist, known as Cartrain, took a few shots of the Hirst piece For The Love of God and used it to create another piece that he then sold on the website 100artoworks.com. Somehow, Hirst heard about this and flipped his lid, demanding to the Design and Artists Copyright Society that the piece not only be taken down but any money made from it be forfeited. Cartrain did as he was told but was secretly plotting his revenge.
At the time, Hirst had a version of his installation Pharmacy on exhibition at Tate Britain. Cartrain went to visit the installation and pocketed a set of pencils that were part of the show. Marvellously, he followed this up with a wanted poster detailing his demands for the safe return of the pencils. He wanted the money he made from his banned artwork back and the ability to sell it again, or “on 31 July the pencils will be sharpened. He has been warned.” Spectacular stuff.
Pretty much the only person not to see the funny side was Hirst, who went absolutely livid. He had Cartrain arrested and charged with £500,000 worth of art theft. Had the charges stuck, it would have been the single biggest art theft in British history. Thankfully, they didn’t. Not because Hirst saw sense, for the record. No, when the Metropolitan Police sees more sense than you with regards to teenagers being charged with theft and drops your charges, you really have lost the plot.
The saga seemingly ends there, but one can really imagine Hirst still seething about being so thoroughly owned by a teenager today, right?